Lawrence Block - A Ticket To The Boneyard

"When did the calls come? When we were in bed?"

"Must have. Is it all right if I play them back?"

"Why shouldn't it be?"

She shrugged and pressed the appropriate button. There was a whirring sound, some background noise, then a click. "A hang-up," she said. "That's what I get most of the time. A lot of people don't like to leave a message."

There was another hang-up. Then a man said, very crisply and confidently, "Elaine, this is Jerry Pines, I'll give you a call in a day or so." Then another hang-up, and then a caller who cleared his throat forcefully, took a long moment trying to think of something to say, and rang off without a word.

Then the sixth caller. A fairly long pause, with the tape running and only background noise audible. Then a whisper:

"Hello, Elaine. Did you like the flowers?"

Another pause, as long as the first. Throughout it the background noise, actually quite low in volume, sounded like the roar of a subway train.

And then, in the same forceful whisper, he said, "I was thinking of you earlier. But it's not your turn yet. You have to wait your turn, you know. I'm saving you for last." A pause, but a brief one. "I mean second-last. He'll be the last."

That was all he had to say, but the tape ran another twenty or thirty seconds before he broke the connection. Then the answering machine clicked and whirred and readied itself to handle incoming calls again, and we sat there in a silence that hung in the air like smoke.

I was back in my hotel room before dawn, but I didn't beat the sun by much. It was well past four by the time I got there, and I'd spent the whole night running all over the city, going places I hadn't been in years. Some of them were long gone, and some of the people I was looking for were gone, too, dead or in jail or in some other world. But there were new places and new people, and I found my way to enough of them to keep busy.

I found Danny Boy Bell in Poogan's. He is a short albino Negro, precise in his gestures and polite in his manners. He has always worn conservatively cut three-piece suits and he has always kept vampire's hours, never leaving his house between sunrise and sunset. His habits hadn't changed, and he still drank Russian vodka straight up and ice-cold. The bars that were home to him, Poogan's Pub and the Top Knot, always kept a bottle on ice for him. The Top Knot's gone now.

"There's a French restaurant there now," he told me. "High-priced and not very good. I'm here a lot these days. Or I'll be at Mother Goose on Amsterdam. They got a nice little trio, plays there six nights a week. The drummer uses the brushes and he never takes a solo. And they keep the lights right."

Right meant dimmed way down. Danny Boy wears dark glasses all the time, and he'd probably wear them at the bottom of a coal mine. "The world's too loud and too bright," I'd heard him say more than once. "They should put in a dimmer switch. They should turn the volume down."

He didn't recognize the sketch, but Motley's name struck a chord with him. I started to fill him in and he remembered the case. "So he's coming back at you," he said. "Why don't you just grab a plane, go someplace warm while he cools off? Guy like that, give him a few weeks and he'll step on his cock and wind up back in slam. You won't have to worry about him for another ten years."

"I think he's gotten pretty shrewd."

"Went up for one-to-ten and served twelve, how much of a genius can he be?" He finished his drink and moved his hand a few inches, which was all he had to do to get the waitress's attention. After she'd filled his glass and assured herself that I was still all right, he said, "I'll pass the word and keep my ears open, Matt. All I can do."

"I appreciate it."

"Hard to know where he might hang out, or who he might rub up against. Still, there's places you could check."

He gave me some leads and I went out and chased them around the city. I went to a chicken-and-ribs joint on Lenox Avenue and a bar down the street from it where a lot of the uptown players did their drinking. I caught a cab downtown to a place called Patchwork on Third Avenue in the Twenties, where Early American quilts hung on the exposed brick walls. I told the bartender I was there to see a man named Tommy Vincent. "He's not in just now," I was told, "but he usually comes in around this time, if you'd care to wait for him."

I ordered a Coke and waited at the bar. The back-bar mirror let me keep an eye on the door without turning around. I watched some people come in and some others leave, and by the time I had nothing in my glass but ice cubes, a fat man two stools down from me came over and put an arm around me as if we were old friends. "I'm Tommy V.," he said. "Something I can do for you?"

I walked on Park Avenue in the Twenties, Third just below Fourteenth Street, Broadway in the high Eighties,Lexington between Forty-seventh and Fiftieth. That's where the street girls were hard at it, decorously turned out in hot pants and peekaboo halters and orange wigs. I talked to dozens of them, and I let them think I was a cop; they wouldn't have believed a denial anyway. I showed Motley's picture around and said he was a man who liked to hurt working girls, and a likely killer. I said he might be a john, or at least play the part of one, but that he fancied himself a pimp and might try to corral an outlaw girl.

A sallow blonde on Third, her dark roots giving her a two-tone hairdo, thought she recognized him. "Saw him a time ago," she said. "Looks but don't buy. One time he's got these questions. What will I do, what won't I do, what do I like, what don't I like." She made a fist, held it at her crotch, moved it in a pumping motion. "Jerking me around. Got no time for that, you know? Time I see him after that, I just walk on by."

A girl on Broadway, with an overblown body and a Deep South accent, said she'd seen him around, but not lately. Last she'd seen of him he'd gone off with a girl named Bunny. And where was Bunny? She'd gone off somewhere, disappeared, hadn't been around in weeks. "On some other stroll," she said. "Or maybe something happened." Like what? She shrugged. "Anything," she said. "You see somebody," she said, "and then you don't. And you don't miss them right away, and then you say, 'Hey, what happened to that person?' And nobody knows." Had she seen Bunny again since she'd gone off with Motley? She thought it over and couldn't say one way or the other. And maybe it hadn't been Motley that Bunny had gone with. The more she thought about it, the vaguer she seemed to get.

Somewhere along the way I managed to get to the midnight meeting at Alanon House, a sort of clubhouse occupying a suite of offices on the third floor of a decaying building on West Forty-sixth Street. They get a young crowd at that meeting, many of them newly and shakily sober, and a majority having a history of heavy drug use along with alcoholism. The crowd that night was a lot like the people outside, the biggest single difference being the direction they were headed. The ones at the meeting were staying clean and sober, or trying to. The ones out there on the street were slipping off the edge of the world.

I got there a few minutes late. The speaker had gotten as far as her twelfth birthday, by which time she'd been drinking for two years and had just started smoking marijuana. The story went on to include all the popular chemical mood-changers, not excepting IV heroin and cocaine, along with shoplifting, street prostitution, and the black-market sale of her infant son. It took a while to tell but it hadn't taken all that long to live; she was only nineteen now.

The meeting lasted an hour and I stayed until the end. My attention faded after the speaker finished up, and I didn't contribute anything to the discussion, which was ostensibly on the topic of anger. I tuned in now and then when some speaker's anger was voluble enough to break in on my reverie, but for the most part I just let my mind drift and took emotional sanctuary in the meeting. It was a nasty world outside and I'd been seeking out the nastiest part of it for the past few hours, but in here I was just another alcoholic trying to stay sober, same as everyone else, and that made it a very safe place to be.